Court upholds crackdown on pot dispensaries

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For medical marijuana patients and their suppliers, it’s usually a good idea to steer clear of federal courts, which classify pot as a dangerous drug with no therapeutic value, regardless of how it’s labeled in California and an increasing number of other states.

The latest example came Wednesday in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Without holding a hearing, and only two days after taking the cases under submission, the court needed just four pages of text to dispose of three lawsuits challenging a crackdown by federal prosecutors that has closed hundreds of marijuana dispensaries across California.

The campaign began in October 2011 when the state’s four regional U.S. attorneys said they would take action against property owners who leased space to pot shops in violation of federal narcotics laws. Dispensary owners and some of their patients went to court, claiming violations of their constitutional rights and arguing that the Obama administration was breaking a promise to let states set their own medical marijuana policies.

Federal judges in Oakland, Sacramento and San Diego dismissed the suits, and they got short shrift Wednesday from the three-judge appellate panel.

Claims of a “fundamental right” to distribute and use marijuana as a medicine, with a doctor’s recommendation, were rejected in a 2007 Ninth Circuit ruling that is still binding, the appeals court said. Although medical use of marijuana is more accepted now than it was then, the court said, “we are unwilling to declare that legal recognition of such a right has reached the point where it should be removed from the arena of public debate and legislative action” — action by Congress, that is, and not the states.

The court also said the federal government, in all of its policy statements and actions in prior legal cases, never promised not to enforce the federal Controlled Substances Act, which outlaws possession and distribution of marijuana.

Prosecutors said the court was just stating the obvious.

The ruling was “a straightforward application of existing precedent, which merely confirms that the CSA continues to be in full force and effect, regardless of state law,” said Sacramento’s U.S. attorney, Benjamin Wagner.

Matthew Kumin, a lawyer for dispensaries that include the now-shuttered Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Fairfax, said he would ask the full appeals court for a rehearing before a larger panel, which would have the power to overturn the 2007 decision.

“When you’re climbing a mountain and you’re excited about getting to the top, you’re still going to get snowstorms,” Kumin said. “It’s like other civil rights movements. …We’ll get there eventually.”